"The guests must not see one speck of dust nor one unpolished door-handle," Mor Inga said. "For they will walk over the whole house and notice everything."
"Now remember," enjoined Knutty, as Mor Inga rose to go back to domestic difficulties, "do your best, and don't waste time trying to please any relation on earth; for it is an impossibility."
Solli passed by afterwards, and paused to say a few words to Tante. He did not often talk.
"We are in for a thunderstorm," he said. "I wish we had more water. Rain has been so scarce that we have no water with which to put the fire out, if the Gaard should be struck by lightning. There has not been such a dry season for years."
Old Kari paused a moment on her way to the house, where Bedstefar lay in sublime unconsciousness of life, the things of this world, and the bustling preparations which were being carried on for his funeral feast. He lay there decorated with scented geranium-leaves. The entrance-door of his resting-place was guarded by two young fir-trees, which Karl had cut down from the woods above. He was visited from time to time by different members of the family, and old Kari went in continually, sprinkling the ground with water, and strewing fresh sweet juniper-leaves on the floor which Bedstefar would never tread again. She held some juniper in her apron now.
"God morgen," she said, nodding to Tante. "Ak, ja! I knew Bedstefar would die yesterday. Lisaros was so restless. And there is still more trouble to come, for Fjeldros has a very sore throat!"
Then Jens and Alan came back in the gig.
"We are going to have an awful storm, Knutty," Alan said. "It is suffocating down in the valley. Where's father?"
"He went out," Knutty answered, pointing vaguely in the direction of the birch-woods.
"I'll go and meet him," Alan said.
"Don't go, Alan," Knutty said a little anxiously. "You don't know which way he will come back."
"Knutty," the boy asked shyly, "did he tell you we'd—we'd—we'd——"
"Yes," answered Knutty, with a comforting nod. "I know all about it."
"I feel quite a different fellow now," Alan said. "And father was so awfully good to me. He wasn't angry or upset or anything. And he was just splendid about mother, and—and, Knutty, I—I shall always hate myself."
"You may do that as much as you like, so long as you love him," Knutty said. "Now help me up, stakkar. I am going to take another lesson in the making of fladbröd. And Mette is beckoning to me that she is ready to begin."
As they strolled together across the courtyard to the hut where Mette was making the fladbröd, Knutty said:
"I feel ten stone lighter to-day to think that my darling icebergs have come together again. They must never drift apart any more."
"Never," said Alan eagerly; and Knutty, glancing at him out of the corner of her sharp little eyes, was satisfied that Clifford had won or was winning his son back to their old loving comradeship.
"Ah," she thought, "how unconscious the boy is of the wound he has inflicted on his father. Well, that's all right. It is only fair on the young that they should not realise the limits of their own understanding."
So they went in and watched the bright and dramatic Mette, with whom Tante had an affinity, making fladbröd for the funeral guests. She explained that she was making the best quality now: cooked potato, barley and rye, finely powdered and mixed, without water. Gaily she rolled this mystic compound until it was as thin as a sheet of paper, and she whipped it off with a flourish on to the top of the fladbröd-oven, known as a "Takke," a round, flat iron oven placed for the time being in the Peise. Then she turned it at the right moment on to its other side, and whisked it off with another flourish on to the top of a great pile of fladbröd, which looked like a ruined pillar of classic times.
"Certainly," said Tante, nodding approvingly, "thou art a true artiste, Mette."
"I do it best when I'm watched," said Mette, laughing. "Then I get excited."
"An artiste should get excited," said Knutty.
Then Knutty learnt that there were other kinds of fladbröd, the coarsest quality being made of beans, barley, and water. And she was still acquiring accurate knowledge on this important subject, and listening delightedly to Mette's animated explanations, when a clap of thunder was heard.
"Nei da!" cried Mette, "we are in for a storm. I must go and call my poor cows home. It is nearly milking-time."
Tante found Gerda, Katharine, and Alan standing together in the courtyard.
"Here comes my Ejnar," Gerda exclaimed, as a lone figure came into view on the hillside. "I am thankful he has not strayed far. Solli says we are in for an awful storm."
"And I see some one yonder," Katharine said. "I daresay that is Professor Thornton."
But it proved to be the Sorenskriver. He hastened back to the Gaard, hurrying the loitering Ejnar on with him. Every one had now returned except Clifford. The sky grew blacker and more threatening. There was no rain. Hesitating claps of thunder were heard. Knutty, Katharine, and some of the others gathered together on the verandah, which commanded the whole view of the valley, and watched the awe-inspiring exhibition of Nature's anger. The fury of the storm broke loose. The lightning was blinding, the thunder terrific. Time after time they all thought that the Gaard must have been struck. At last the rain fell heavily and more heavily. Every one was relieved to hear it; for the turf on the roofs of all the black houses and barns was as dry as matchwood. Every one in different corners of the Gaard was keeping a look-out for Clifford.
Knutty pretended to be philosophic, and said at intervals:
"He is quite safe, I am sure. He has taken shelter somewhere. Besides, he loves a thunderstorm, the silly fellow! Isn't it ridiculous? Now, I think the only pleasant place in a thunderstorm is the coal-cellar. I've found it a most consoling refuge."
And when Alan said:
"I'm getting awfully anxious about father, Knutty," she answered:
"Now, really, kjaere, don't be foolish. He can take care of himself. He was not born yesterday."
They all tried to reassure and divert the boy, all of them, including even Ejnar.
"If the Kemiker does not bring some treasure back from his long expedition," he said, "I, for one, will have nothing to say to such a contemptible wretch."
Mor Inga came to add her word of comfort.
"No doubt the Professor has taken shelter at that little lonely Saeter in the direction of F——," she said.
"He will be comfortable there; and the old woman makes an excellent cup of coffee."
The storm died down. The early evening passed into the late evening; and still Clifford did not come. Ten o'clock struck, and still he did not come. At twelve o'clock the storm broke loose again and raged with redoubled fury. Knutty, Katharine, and Alan watched together, in Knutty's room. They could not induce the boy to go to bed. He was in great distress.
"If father would only come back," he kept on saying; "if he'd only come back. If he does not come soon, I must go and look for him."
"He will not return to-night," Katharine said. "And it would be useless to go out and look for him. As Mor Inga says, he has probably taken shelter in some Saeter, and there he will stay until the morning comes. Cheer up, Alan dear. It will be all right to-morrow."
It was she who finally persuaded the boy to go to bed; and when she looked into his room ten minutes later, he was fast asleep, worn out with the emotions and anxieties of that day. Then Knutty and she watched and waited.
"I should not be feeling so miserable about my poor iceberg," Knutty said, "if he had gone off in a happier mood. But he was quite knocked over by his interview with the boy. It was all so much worse than he had anticipated. That was what I had feared."
"But you see it is past now," Katharine said, reassuring her,—"I mean, the telling of it. He will come back, strengthened and soothed; while Alan's anxiety for his father's safety will help to put things right."
"My dear, I never thought of that," Knutty exclaimed, with a faint glimmer of cheerfulness on her old face. "You leap out to those things. You're an illuminated darling. That's what you are."
Gerda came to see them.
"Ejnar is fast asleep and dreaming of 'Salix,'" she said; "but I could not sleep, Tante. I have been thinking how dreadful it would be if the Professor had been struck by lightning."
"That is what we have all been thinking, stupid one," answered Tante gravely, "but we've had the sense not to say it. Go back to bed and dream of 'Salix' too. Much better for you."
"But I came to comfort you," Gerda said "You must not send me away. Do you know, I have been thinking of that song you love so much, 'Thou who hast sorrow in thy heart.' Shall I sing to you now?"
Knutty nodded.
Gerda sang, softly, softly this Danish song:—
[Listen]
Knutty slept.
CHAPTER XIII.
But Katharine did not sleep. Hour after hour she watched by the window, straining her eyes into the distance. And as he still did not come, and the suspense became intolerable, she went out to find him. It was five o'clock when she left the Gaard, and nearly nine when she returned.
"Has he come back?" she asked eagerly of Gerda, who was standing in the porch. Gerda shook her head.
Just then Ole Persen, the mattress-maker, arrived at the Gaard on his annual round to repair the mattresses or make up new ones from the year's accumulation of wool. Ole was the newsbringer of that part of the Gudbrandsdal, and, for a mattress-maker, was considered to be rather reliable. He would therefore have been quite useless on the staff of an Anglo-Saxon evening newspaper. He brought the news that over at Berg, about ten miles away, an Englishman had been struck dead by the lightning, and his body had been brought down from the mountains to the nearest Skyds-station (posting-station). Ole said that the people over there were sure he was an Englishman, and the doctor had said that the letters in his pocket were all from England. Ole had not seen him; but they had told him that the dead stranger was a tall thin man, with thin, clean-shaven face.
Mor Inga and Solli looked grave.
"Art thou sure he was an Englishman, Ole?" Mor Inga asked abruptly.
"I can only tell thee what they said," answered Ole. "The doctor declared only an Englishman would have so much money in his pocket."
Then Mor Inga told Knutty exactly what she had heard, neither more nor less.
"It may not be our Englishman," Mor Inga said gently, "but——"
And then Knutty told the others, first Gerda and Katharine.
"It may not be our Englishman," Knutty said, looking at them bravely, "but——"
She told Alan.
"Kjaere," she said, "it may not be your dear father, but——"
In a few minutes Knutty, Katharine, and Alan were on their way to Berg.
Solli whipped up the horses unsparingly, and admonished them with weird Norwegian words. His voice and the roar of the foss below were the only sounds heard; for at the onset no one of that anxious little company spoke a single syllable. They sat there with strained faces; they glanced at each other with silent questionings, and then as quickly turned away to look with sightless eyes at the country which was growing sterner and grimmer as the valley became narrower and shut them in from all generous share of sky and space. Suddenly there came a break in the valley, and a flood of light broke upon the travellers; they breathed a sigh of relief, and even smiled faintly, as though that unexpected blessing had, for the moment, eased the overwhelming burden of their hearts. They passed the place where the church had stood before it was swept away in the great avalanche of a hundred years ago; and on they went, skirting a fine old Gaard built near a great mound, said to be the resting-place of some renowned chieftain; on they went, in their silence and suspense. The two women glanced from time to time at the drawn face opposite, and the boy felt the silent comfort of their sympathy. When at last he spoke, the relief to them was as great as if there had been a second break in the valley. He bent forward and put his hands on their knees.
"I don't know what I should do without you both," he said simply, and he drew back again.
"Stakkar," Knutty said, "two or three miles more, and we shall know."
"Oh, Knutty," the boy cried in a sudden agony, "and I've been saying such cruel things to him, and never thinking about hurting him; and he went off all alone, and I can't bear to think that——"
Alan broke off; and once more Knutty saw before her the solitary figure of her beloved Englishman climbing up the steep hillside and disappearing into the birch-woods. She heard his words, "It will be all right for me later." Her eyes became dim; and she would have given way to her grief then and there, but for Katharine, who, notwithstanding her own great need, lent half her youthful courage, strength, and hopefulness to the old Danish woman.
"Tante," she said in her impulsive way, "for pity's sake don't forget that you are of Viking descent—a heartless, remorseless pirate, in fact."
There came a faint smile on the old Dane's face.
"Thank you for reminding me of my ancestors, kjaere," she said.
"And besides," continued Katharine, "we may yet find another break in the valley. We may find that all our fears have been only the fears of love and anxiety."
"Do you really, really think that?" the boy cried, turning to her with passionate eagerness.
"Yes, Alan," she answered, without flinching.
So she buoyed them up, and heartened herself as well, although she was saying to herself all the time:
"Oh, my love, my love, if it be indeed you lying there in the silence of death, then my womanhood lies buried with my girlhood."
At last the horses drew up at the entrance of an old Gaard which was also the Skyds-station of that district. Solli had called out immediately, and a young woman in the Gudbrandsdal dress stepped into the courtyard.
"Yes, yes, stakkar, he lies upstairs," she said, glancing sympathetically at the three travellers. "Come, I will lead the way."
They passed up the massive stairs outside the old house, and reached the covered verandah. She pointed to a door at the end of the passage.
"That is the room," she said gently; and with the fine understanding of the true Norwegian peasant, she left them.
Katharine put a detaining hand on Knutty and Alan.
"Shall I go in first and come and tell you?" she asked. "I am the stranger. It should be easier for me."
But they shook their heads, clung to her closer, and so all three passed into the room together. The room was not darkened; but sweet juniper-leaves had been spread over the floor. Katharine led them like two little stricken children to the bed of death: one of them a child indeed, and the other an old woman of seventy, childlike in her need of protecting help.
Then Katharine bent forward, and with trembling hands reverently lifted the covering from the dead man's face—and they looked.
A cry rose to their lips.
The dead man was not their beloved one.
CHAPTER XIV.
Like children, too, Katharine led them from the room and took them into the old Peise-stue below. Tante had for the time being forgotten her Viking origin. Her nerve completely forsook her; and she cried abundantly, from the strain and the merciful loosening of the tension. Once she smiled through her tears as she pressed Katharine's hand and gave Alan a reassuring nod.
"Ak," she said, "this is not the correct behaviour of an abandoned sea-robber, is it?" And to Alan she added quaintly:
"Don't I make a beautiful comforter, kjaere? Ought not I to be proud of myself?"
He made no answer, but came close to her, to show that she was a comforting presence. He was painfully quiet—indeed, he seemed half-bewildered; and Katharine, glancing at his ashen face, knew that he was still under the spell of death's mysterious majesty. She wished that they had not suffered him to go into that room of death; and yet he would never have been satisfied to remain outside and take their word; it was perhaps his own father lying there, and he had to see for himself. But that part of it was over, and she felt she must break the spell for him at once. She thought of scores of things to say; but nothing seemed suitable. Suddenly, without thinking, she said:
"I know it sounds dreadfully prosaic; but I believe we should all be better for some food. I am famished. Do go and ask that nice woman if we can have breakfast, Alan."
The old Peise-stue in which they were sitting was a typical old Norwegian room, with its quaint painted furniture, its sideboard adorned with inscriptions, its Peise in the corner, fitted up in true old fashion with a shelf on the top, which was furnished with carved and painted jugs and bowls. There was, of course, a recess in the wall for the Langeleik, and a queer little cupboard for the housewife's keys. Old carved and painted mangles (manglebret), marriage gifts to several generations, hung on the walls. The Kubbe-stul,[P] made from a solid block of wood, stood in the corner. At any other time Katharine and Knutty would have been deeply interested in seeing this characteristic old place. But now they scarcely noticed it. They sat together looking at nothing, and awaiting in silence the boy's return.
He came back with a different expression on his face.
"It's all right," he said. "We can have breakfast. I'm awfully hungry too."
"So am I," said Tante; and in a few minutes the servant, in her pretty costume of red bodice, white sleeves, and black skirt edged with green, served them a good meal of trout, fladbröd, and admirable flödemelk (milk with cream).
"Ripping, isn't it?" Katharine said, nodding approvingly to Alan.
"Ripping," he answered, always so glad and proud of her camaraderie.
"And now you'll go back to the Gaard," she went on, "and I believe you will find your father waiting for you there, Alan. This was a false alarm of danger, and I cannot think there is any more trouble in store."
"Do you really think that?" they both said to her.
"Yes," she answered, touched beyond words by their pathetic dependence on her. "I believe he will come down from the mountains, and that you will find him safe and sound."
"But you will be there too?" Alan said anxiously. And Knutty also said:
"But you will be there too?"
"I shall be with you in spirit," Katharine said; "but, you see, my place is here, upstairs, Knutty, with that dead Englishman, lying lonely and uncared for in a strange land. I could not go away until I, as an Englishwoman, had done something on his behalf: watched by him a little, written to his people, done something to show him that our gratitude to him for not being—ours—had passed into gentle concern for him and his."
Her voice faltered for the first time that morning when she paused at the word "ours."
"So you will go back without me," she said; "but you will tell Professor Thornton why I stayed behind. He will understand."
"Ah," said Knutty, looking at her lovingly, "you English people have the true secret of nationality."
So they left her there, sadly enough; yet knowing that for the moment her place was not with them, to whom she had already been so much, but with her dead countryman upstairs. Knutty, with many tender instructions, gave her into the charge of the people of the house. Solli's last words as he drove off were:
"Take care of the English lady. Send her safely back in your best cariole."
Katharine stood watching the carriage until it was out of sight; and then a great longing and loneliness seized her. The music and words of Gerda's Swedish song suddenly came into her remembrance:
And the wail of despair at the end of the verse smote as a piercing blast on her spirit.
"Yes," she said, "he will come down from the mountains, and the joy of reunion will be theirs; and I shall be outside of it—outside of it as always. Always outside the heart of things."
She went slowly up the stairs; but when she reached the threshold where the dead man was lying alone and as yet unmourned, she had forgotten herself and her own personal life.
She uncovered his face once more. There was the burnt mark where the lightning had passed through his brain. She tried to hide it with his hair. His eyes were closed; but she laid her gentle hands on each of them, so that his own countrywoman, and not a foreigner, should be the one to put the last seal of sightlessness on them. She drew a soft little handkerchief from her satchel and spread it over his face. Then she glanced through the letters and papers which had been found on him, and she discovered his name and his home address in Cornwall. He was a soldier, captain in one of the line regiments. Probably he had been out in South Africa. Yes, there was a letter addressed to him at Bloemfontein. Katharine's sympathy deepened.
"Even more willingly do I watch by him," she said.
As there was no evidence of where he had come from in Norway, and as the people of the Skyds-station had not even begun to make active inquiries, she telegraphed to his Cornish address, and also to two or three of the sanatoria in the more mountainous part of the country. No answer came; and meantime she watched by his side, weaving from some forget-me-nots and berries a garland, which she placed at his feet. It was no strain to her to be giving her companionship to the dead. Katharine was fearless of life and fearless of death, fearless of the living, fearless of the dead. Her mind wandered back to her own dead: her mother whom she had loved passionately and lost as a young girl; her girlhood's lover, whom she had lost when she was scarcely twenty; her school-friend, whom she had laid to rest ten years past. When each of them had died, she had said, "This is the end of everything for me." But she knew that those words had been no truer for her at thirty than at thirteen, and that the only end of life itself, and therefore of life's thrill, was death itself; and then was that the end? Was there immortality?—and what was immortality? Was it, as some one had once told her, merely the natural persistence under different conditions of the temperamentally strong? Not necessarily the persistence of the good, but of the masterful? She thought of all the forceful people she had known, and she could not believe in their obliteration; somehow, somewhere they would surely continue their individual processes for good or for bad. She thought of all the half-toned, colourless people she had known, who scarcely seemed to have any life in them in this life. Was it reasonable to suppose that there could be any continuance of their feeble outlines?
She recalled a conversation she had had with an embittered man in Arizona. He had scoffed at everything: at life, at love, at patriotism, at death, at immortality.
"Belief in immortality!" he had cried. "Why, it is just a typical bit of selfishness, that's all. We want immortality for ourselves and for those we love. But we do not want it for those we hate. We do not want it for those who interfere with us. We may pretend to have the principle of it implanted in our hearts; but all we really care about is the offshoot—the personal application of it to our own individual needs."
She remembered she had said to him:
"Yes, but the people hated by us are loved by other people; so that all the thousands and thousands of personal applications create the great principle, surely?"
She remembered his answer:
"That is not logical," he had said.
"Logical!" she had replied. "What a word to use about the great mysteries of life and death! Learn to love some one. Then you will not crave to be logical about immortality; you will only crave to believe in it."
He had laughed at her; but two years later he wrote:
"Since seeing you, I have loved and have lost my love. I buried her in the little canon not far from my ranch. I find myself turning, spite of myself, to a belief in immortality, whatever that may be."
Whatever that may be. That was the whole mystery which the reasoning of all the finest brains in the world's history had failed to unravel. Love, itself a great mystery, had done more. Was it possible that love, itself a mystery, and yet a key to many of life's perplexing problems, might prove to be the only key to the problems of death?
These thoughts passed through Katharine's mind as she watched over the dead.
Once she turned in her impulsive way to that silent companion.
"If you could only tell us what you have found!" she cried.
And then she recalled to her mind something which a great thinker had said in her presence.
"Some day," he had said, "we may stumble across the natural means of communication with the dead, and, like all other great discoveries, it will seem simple. The difficulties are insuperable in the present state of knowledge among the living; and the dead have to recover from the shock of death, and to find readjustment to altered conditions of existence. But there is all Time in which to work out the discovery; and there is always the chance that we may find out the great truth by an accident of detail in our researches and reflections."
"But the dead have to recover from the shock of death." What was it he meant? Death was a shock to the nervous system of the living; but to the dead themselves surely it was——Ah, that was just the whole mystery; and the chemist, the philosopher, the poet, the musician, the explorer, the priest, and herself, an ordinary unilluminated person of average intelligence,—all were mere surmisers—mere surmisers....
Then the door was gently opened, and Katharine, leaving with a sigh of relief the regions of surmise, came back to actual life; for, first and foremost, she was human, and the earth was her territory. The woman of the Gaard said something to her, and beckoned to her. Katharine followed her out of the room, and tried to understand what she was saying, but could only gather the words, "To Engelske" (Two Englishmen). The woman, who seemed greatly harassed, took her straight to the "Peise-stue," pointed in a despairing way to two men, said, "Engelsk," and hurried off, holding her hands to her head, as though things were too much for her. Katharine saw two Englishmen sitting warming themselves before the fire. They turned round as she came in, and she noticed at a glance that the elder of the two was the exact image of the dead man upstairs.
"Then you got my telegram," she said, thinking at once of the telegram which she had sent off to three of the mountain sanatoria.
"Telegram?" said the elder man, looking at her in a puzzled way. "What telegram? I've had no telegram; could have had no telegram. I, my friend, and my brother have been out in the mountains fishing; but my brother left us. The storm came on; he did not return, and we made our way down here, hoping to find him or get some news of him. Perhaps you can tell us something; for the woman of the house does not understand a word we say, and we don't understand her. We are quite bewildered, and so is she."
Katharine looked at the two Englishmen, and saw that they were worn out, wet through, and hopelessly at a loss. Her protective instincts for those who were in trouble leapt up within her. She was not going to suffer these tired fellows to have any unnecessary shock, and so she took the precaution of asking the elder man his name.
It was the name of the dead man upstairs.
Then in the gentlest manner possible, as though she had known this stranger years instead of minutes, Katharine broke the sad news to him.
CHAPTER XV.
When Clifford said good-bye to Knutty and passed out of sight into the birch-woods, he had no intention of going in any definite direction. He wished to get on to the heights somewhere and be alone with Nature, that tender nurse who is ever waiting to hold out her healing hands to the sick of body and of spirit. She had never failed him, and he knew that she would not fail him now; that she would minister to him in her own beautiful, strengthening way, until she had made him whole; putting balm on stinging wounds, and exchanging his cup of bitterness for a phial of courage. He had always loved her, always sought her out, always laid everything before her, and learnt from her, over and over again, the relative value and the actual size of the difficulties which life presented to him. He had carried out to her some burden which seemed enormous, and brought it back from her so shrunk that he would scarcely have known it for his burden; rather for some one else's load, which is always deemed lighter. So he went to seek her help. He strolled through the birch-woods, scarcely noticing where he trod; gained the open slopes, and then climbed slowly in the direction of a little isolated Saeter which commanded a view of the fine Rondane mountains. He paused now and then, and dug his stick into the springy moss and the stunted juniper-bushes.
"The boy always loved me," he said bitterly. "And now?"
And Nature said:
"He will love you again."
"Ever since the little fellow could find his way about he wanted to be with me," he said bitterly. "And now?"
And Nature said:
"He will want to be with you again."
"It is all so much worse than I thought," the man said bitterly. "At the very worst I thought that he might have believed I had been unkind to Marianne. But——"
And Nature said:
"He did not know what he did believe. The tiny cone of disbelief had grown into one of my giant forest-trees. But now we have hewn down that giant tree, used it to defeat itself, and made a strong bridge of it, over which the boy passes to reach you again."
"Passes back to me as he was before?" the man asked.
And Nature said:
"No, no, passes forward, onward to meet you at another point. For you, too, have passed on."
"Ah," cried the man, "I have been forgetting him. All my thoughts have been for her—and this is my just punishment, that in the midst of my selfish happiness I should be wounded in my tenderest affections, and reminded of the bitter past—reminded of the manner of Marianne's death and my share in it."
"Morbid conscientiousness, morbid conscientiousness," Nature said. "Often have you and I fought out that battle together—fought it out at midnight on the moors and on the mountains, and along the lonely country roads. And now we must fight it out again; here, this very moment, with the Rondane in front of us, and the snow-peaks in the distance, and the great Gudbrandsdal spread out below us."
So they fought it out, and it was a hard battle, a hand-to-hand fight; for the man was stubborn, and prepared to defend his fortress of self-reproach and sadness to the bitter end. But Nature gathered together all her forces—and conquered.
And when the dire battle was over, she held out her hands to him, and ministered to him; at her bidding the bracing mountain air sent currents of fresh life into the man's body; the great expanse sent a thrill of freedom into his soul; the magnificence of earth and sky sent a thrill of gratitude and gladness into his spirit.
"The earth is beautiful and life is splendid!" he cried, as he lifted up his head and passed on his way.
"Ah," said Nature softly.
"The boy loves me!" he cried. "We shall have a closer friendship than before."
"Ah," said Nature gently.
"I have the right to love her!" he cried. "I shall seek her out and tell her everything."
"Ah," said Nature softly.
"Yes," the man cried. "I shall tell her everything about my poor Marianne's death. She has a great heart and a noble mind. She will understand. My beautiful love——"
"Ah," said Nature tenderly. "I can safely leave him now—conquered and renewed."
And yet she paused for a moment, fearful to leave his side until she was certain that the child whom she had always loved had reached a firm foothold of healthy human instincts.
"My beautiful love!" he cried. "You understood from the very beginning, and came to warn me of Mrs Stanhope's slanderous tongue. I little guessed what she was capable of saying to my boy; but you knew, and did not shrink from me."
Then, as his thoughts turned to Mrs Stanhope, anger and indignation took possession of him.
"I will go and find her now," he cried. "I will find my way over the mountains somehow, and see her face to face."
"Ah," said Nature, smiling, "I can leave him now in the safe keeping of human love and healthy human anger."
So she left his immediate presence, and he became unconscious of his surroundings, and tramped across the rough mountainous country determined to reach Mrs Stanhope. He did not notice the signs in the heavens; the gathering storm gave him no warning; or at least no warning reached him. The storm broke loose at last, and aroused him to the knowledge that he was miles away from the Gaard, lost on the mountains, and alone with Nature in her wildest mood. The heavens were in raging tumult; the thunder was terrific; the lightning appalling. At first there was no rain. The man leaned against a rock and watched the awful splendour of the scene; watched the opening of the clouds and the passing of the lightning. It held him spellbound, entranced. He had always loved to be out in a great storm. He stood there, an unconscious target for its fury, and nothing harmed him; the lightning played around him, tore up the ground within a few yards of his feet, withered up a stunted juniper-bush within reach of his arm. Nature, working harm and bringing sorrow in other directions, spared him to those who loved him and were waiting for him.
So he stood, confronting the storm, with all personal thoughts and emotions in abeyance. But when the rain poured down in torrents, he began to think of finding shelter, and remembered that he had passed a lonely little Saeter. He had only a vague idea of his bearings; and, indeed, without knowing it, as he tried to retrace his steps he was wandering farther away, both from that Saeter and from the Gaard.
He became distressed about the anxiety which his prolonged absence would be causing to his friends: to dear old Knutty, who had seen him start off so sadly: to his boy: to Katharine. He knew that they were waiting for him, and wanting him, and that they were watching the storm, and watching the evening fading into the night. He knew so well that Knutty would pretend not to be troubled, and would scold every one who even suggested that there might be cause for anxiety. He almost heard her saying:
"He loves a thunderstorm. The silly fellow, I know him well!"
He smiled as he thought of her.
"My dear old Dane!" he said. "My dear old brick of a Dane!"
He wandered on and on trying to find the Saeter, changing his direction several times, but in vain. But at last he caught sight of a habitation at some distance, and made straight for it, thankful to have found a haven. There was a light in the hut. Clifford knocked, and the door was instantly opened. There was a fire in the stove.
"Ak," said the old woman who opened the door, "I thought it was my son. But you are welcome. It is a fearful night. Many times I thought the hut was struck. I am glad for company."
The son came in a few minutes afterwards, and she made hot coffee for them both, whilst they dried themselves before the crackling logs. And overcome by the genial warmth and his long wanderings, Clifford slept.
And he dreamed of Katharine. He dreamed that he, who had always found speech difficult, was able to tell her the story of Marianne's death. He dreamed that he went on telling her, and she went on listening; and it was such an easy matter to tell, that he only wondered he had been silent so long.
"And that is all," he said, and he waited for her to speak as she turned her dear face towards him. But when she was beginning to speak, he awoke.
He awoke, glad and strong. He who had come out broken and embittered, was going back made whole and sound. He thought of his last words to Knutty:
"I shall be better later."
They had come true. The long wrestle with morbid conscientiousness, his defeat, his wanderings, the great storm, the safe arrival at a haven, his dream, and now his glad awakening had made him whole.
The storm had died down about two in the morning, and it was nearly six before he awoke. He could scarcely wait to drink the coffee which the old woman prepared for him; scarcely wait to hear her directions for getting back to the Gaard. He was off like some impatient boy before she had finished telling him.
His step was brisk, his heart was light, his grave face was smiling. He sang. He did not notice that the way was long and rough. Everything in life seemed easy to him. He trod on air. At last, after several hours, he saw the smoke of the Solli Gaard. He hastened through the birch-woods, down the hillside, and into the courtyard. There was a group of people standing round the carriage, which had evidently just come back from a journey. Mor Inga and Gerda were helping Knutty out of the carriage. Ejnar, Alan, and the Sorenskriver, Solli, Ragnhild, and every one belonging to the Gaard, including old Kari, crowded round her.
"Thank God, thank God, it was not he," she was saying.
Then old Kari looked up and saw Clifford. She firmly believed him to be dead and thought this was his ghost.
"Aa Jösses!"[Q] she cried, falling down on her knees and folding her hands in prayer.
They all turned and saw him. Alan rushed forward to meet his father.
"Oh, father," the boy cried, "we thought you were dead—killed by the lightning."
Then his pent-up feelings found their freedom in an outburst of passionate, healing tears. Clifford folded him in his arms and comforted him.
"And you cared so much?" the father asked, with a thrill of gladness.
"Yes, yes!" the boy whispered, clinging close to him.
Then arm-in-arm they came to Knutty, who in her unselfishness had stood back, wanting her two icebergs to have their meeting to themselves.
"Dear one," she said, with tears in her eyes, "I have done all my crying, and every one can tell you that I have behaved disgracefully. And now I can do my scolding. How dared you give us so much anxiety? Ak, it is all too much for me. I'm going to cry after all."
He stooped and kissed her hand.
"Don't scold me, and don't cry, dear Knutty," he said. "I have come back from the mountains strong and glad."
They all pressed round him, greeting him warmly. Every one belonging to the Gaard seemed to him to be there, except Katharine. And he hungered for the sight of her.
"Knutty," he asked, "where is she—where is Miss Frensham?"
Knutty led him away and told him in broken words the history of the morning, and their fearful anxiety, and Katharine's tender kindness.
"And she stayed there with the dead Englishman," Knutty said gently. "She said she could not leave him alone, and that you would understand. She said you would come down safely from the mountains, and the joy of reunion would be ours, and that she would be with us in spirit. I know, kjaere, she suffered greatly in staying behind."
The man's lip quivered.
"I will go to her," he said.
And the next moment he had prevailed on Solli to change the horses and let Jens come with him. It was all done so quickly that Solli had no time to relent. Clifford sprang in, signed to Alan to follow him, and they were off. Old Kari, rather sullen at having been done out of the ghost, retired crestfallen to the cowhouse.
But Gerda and Tante, Mor Inga and Ragnhild, stood watching the carriage until it had wound round the hill and was out of sight.
"Nå," said Gerda, turning to Tante, "I begin to think that your Englishman is going to fall in love with Fröken Frensham. Who would have imagined such a thing?"
"Every one except you," replied Tante, giving her a hug.
"And why not myself?" asked Gerda.
"Because you are an unilluminated botanical duffer!" answered Tante.
CHAPTER XVI.
Katharine lingered a little while longer at the Skyds-station to comfort, by her sympathetic presence, the brother and friend of the dead Englishman. To the end of their lives they remembered her ministration. She gave out to them royally in generous fashion. It was nothing to her that they were strangers; it was everything to her that they were in trouble and needed a little human kindness. They themselves had forgotten that they were strangers to her. It was a pathetic tribute to her powers of sympathy that they both spoke of the dead man as if she had known him.
"You remember," the brother said, "he never did care for fishing. It always bored him, didn't it?"
"Yes," said Katharine gently.
"Do you remember him saying a few years ago," the friend said, "that he should love to die on the mountains? He always loved the mountains."
"Yes," said Katharine gently.
She scarcely had the heart to leave them; but at last she rose to go, telling them there was an Englishman at the Solli Gaard who spoke Norwegian well, and who would come to help them.
"He is the one for whom we came to seek here," she said, looking away from them. "We are not yet sure that he is safe; but if he comes down from the mountains, I know he will hasten to help you about——"
They bowed their heads silently as she broke off.
"We shall take him home to England," the brother said.
"I am glad he will rest in his own country," Katharine answered.
The people of the Skyds-station fulfilled their promise to Solli, and put Katharine in their best cariole. The two strangers helped her to get in, and then stood watching her. They could not speak. But when she held out her hand in farewell greeting, each man took it and reverently kissed it. She was touched by their silent gratitude, and the tears came into her eyes.
"I am so thankful I stayed behind," she said.
Then the driver, a little fellow of about twelve years old, whipped up the yellow pony, and the Skyds-station was soon out of sight.
"And now, if indeed he has come back, I shall see him," Katharine thought, with a thrill of happiness.
At the Skyds-station, when, by her own choice, she was left alone, she had for the moment felt the bitterness of being outside everything. She remembered her own words:
"He will come down from the mountains, and the joy of reunion will be theirs, and I shall be outside of it—outside of it as always. Always outside the heart of things."
That moment had been only one of the many times of passing sadness and bitterness in Katharine's life, when she had said and felt that she was outside everything: outside the inner heart of friendship which never fails, outside ambitious achievement, outside the region of great gifts, great talents, outside the magic world of imagination, outside love. Her friend had died, her girlhood's lover had died, her brother had failed her. She was alone, a solitary spectator of other people's close friendships, passionate love, successful work, absorbing careers; alone, outside the barrier which separates all restless yearning spirits from that dim Land of Promise; alone, outside. She, ever unconscious of her own genius of giving, had no means of knowing that, by a mysterious dispensation, those who give of themselves royally, without measure, are destined to go out alone into the darkness of the night; alone, outside everything in life.
But no such sad reflections came to Katharine now, as she sped along the narrow valley, by the side of the glacier-river. Her thoughts turned to Clifford and Knutty and Alan in loving unselfishness.
"The boy will have seen his dear father, and will now be comforted," she said.
"Knutty will have seen her Englishman, and will now raise her old head again," she said.
"Ah, how I hope and hope he was there to receive them when they got back to the Gaard," she said.
"And now I shall see him, and the joy of reunion will be mine," she said.
But in the midst of her happy thoughts and yearnings, she did not forget those two lonely compatriots and that silent companion in the bedroom of the Skyds-station.
"My poor strangers," she said, "we will not forsake you."
They had come to the place where the sudden break in the valley had cheered them during that terrible drive of the morning.
"Yes," thought Katharine, "that gave us hope this morning. I should recognise this spot anywhere on earth. It was here I began to have a strong belief that it could not be he lying dead at the Skyds-station."
"Oh," she thought, with a shudder, "if it had been he!—if it had been he!"
And her own words echoed back to her as an answer:
"My womanhood would be buried with my girlhood."
Then she looked up and saw a carriage in the distance, in the far distance. The boy also saw it. As it approached nearer he said:
"It is from the Solli Gaard. That is Jens driving."
Katharine's heart gave a sudden bound.
"Haste, haste!" she said excitedly to the boy; and he, moved by her eagerness, urged on the little yellow pony, which rose to the occasion and flew over the ground.
Carriage and cariole drew up at the same moment, and Katharine saw face to face the man whom she loved.
"We came to fetch you," he said.
CHAPTER XVII.
Bedstefar had been dead for three days, and it had been arranged that the funeral was to take place a week after the night of his death. Preparations had been going steadily forward, interrupted only by the anxiety and excitement caused by Clifford's long absence in the mountains and his supposed death. Bedstemor herself had been much troubled about him, and had spent a good deal of time watching for him. But when he returned safely, she felt free to continue her persecutions in the kitchen; and it took a great amount of Knutty's craftiness to entice her into the porch and keep her there. Bedstemor was astonishingly well, seemed in excellent spirits, and in answer to questions as to how she felt, she always said briskly:
"Bra', bra,' meget bra'" (Well, very well).
Indeed, she was not a little gratified to be once more the central figure of circumstances, as in the old days, before she and her husband had retired to the dower-house. But, spite of her cheerfulness, she looked a pathetic old figure wandering about, relieved from constant attendance at her sick husband's bedside, and thus thrown on the little outside world for distraction and company. Tante was endlessly kind to her, but had many a secret laugh over the old widow's unfunereal attitude of mind, and over her stubborn determination to go and bully every one in the kitchen. Tante herself was in great form again. She had recovered from her fears and tears, and had, so she told Katharine, regained her usual Viking bearing.
"Never shall I forget your tenderness, dear one," she said to Katharine. "If I loved him even a hundred times more than I do, I should not grudge him to you. He loves you, and you are the right aura for him. And some day he will tell you so, although it will not be very soon, stupid fellow! He will try and try many times, and leave off suddenly. I know him well, my prisoner of silence. These reserved people! What a nuisance they are to themselves, and every one else! But to themselves—ak, ak, poor devils!"
Katharine, who was standing at the time on Knutty's bedroom-balcony, looked out into the distance. She herself had been somewhat silent since that sad morning at the Skyds-station.
"The end of it all will be, dear one," Knutty continued recklessly, "that you will have to help him. This sort of man always has to be helped, otherwise he goes on beginning and leaving off suddenly until Doomsday. I know the genus well."
Katharine went away.
"Aha," said Knutty to herself, "I have said too much. And, after all, it is premature. Oh, these parish-clocks! Why, Marianne has only been dead about a year. How like her, only to have been dead about a year! Oh, oh, what a wicked old woman I am!"
She called Katharine, and Katharine came.
"Kjaere," she said, as she stroked Katharine's hand lovingly. "I have always been a free-lance with my naughty old tongue. No one with any sense takes any notice of me. And am I not funny and human too? All this time I have only been thinking that you are the right aura for my Clifford. Not once have I asked myself whether my Clifford were the right aura for you! I should have been an ideal mother, always on the alert to snatch up all the best things for those I loved, regardless of other people's feelings and interests. Ah, that is right, you are smiling, and not angry with your Viking friend. And, dear one, that reminds me again of how you comforted me when I was not behaving like a Viking. Do you remember assuring me that his absence, and Alan's anxiety for him, were working for their complete reconciliation? Your words have come beautifully true, haven't they? Well, you have the great heart that knows."
They were a small party at the Gaard now. Ejnar had gone off to Kongsvold in the Dovre mountains, a district specially interesting to botanists as the habitat of certain plants not found elsewhere. Gerda would have gone with him, but that she had sprained her ankle. She fretted for her Ejnar, although she pretended that his absence was a great relief.
"It is grand to be free at last!" she said to Tante. "Free at last. I can now take a long breath."
"Yes," said Tante, smiling mischievously, "freedom is delightful when it does not make your nose red and your eyes moist!"
Alan had gone off with Jens to a mountain-lake to catch trout for the funeral, and would not be back for a day or two; and Clifford was away at the Skyds-station, helping the two strangers to make the necessary arrangements for taking their sad burden home to England. All the other guests except the Sorenskriver had left, and he was in a thoroughly disagreeable mood, grumbling about the food, and annoyed because there was going to be a funeral at the Gaard.
"Then why not go away?" Katharine suggested on one occasion, when his martyrdom had reached an acute stage.
"Thank you, I choose to stay," he answered in his gruffest tone of voice.
Katharine laughed. She liked the Sorenskriver even at his worst.
"Read this German newspaper, with a whole column of abuse against England," Katharine said, teasing him. "That will make you feel cheerful, Sorenskriver."
"Sniksnak!" said the Sorenskriver, a little less roughly.
"Or come out for a walk with me and help me pick multebaer," she added. "Mor Inga was saying she had not half enough as yet."
"Perhaps I will come," he answered, with a grim smile on his face. He took pleasure in Katharine's company, and was secretly delighted that Clifford was busy helping those Englishmen over at the Skyds-station. In this way he got Katharine to himself, and he sat smoking his long pipe in the porch, grumbling and disagreeable, but, in justice it must be owned, gentle to Bedstemor. Tante declared that he was courting Katharine.
"I am given to understand, dear one," she said, with a twinkle in her eye, "that the Norwegian way of courting is to be extremely disagreeable, and almost rude to the person whom you adore. In a day or two you will have a proposal—and what then?"
"Tante thinks only about marriages," Gerda said reproachfully.
"Well, what else in the world is there to think about?" Tante asked defiantly.
"Oh, Tante, you know you do not think that," Gerda said. "If you really thought that, why didn't you get married yourself?"
"Because, kjaere, no one would have me, except a sea-captain, and he was mad," Knutty answered. "And he killed his mate soon afterwards. I was always glad I was not his mate!"
"It is not true," Gerda said, turning indignantly to Katharine. "She had lots of admirers and lovers. You ask her Englishman. He knows."
"Ah," said Knutty, "perhaps I did have a few admirers in my time! You may be sure no sane woman would ever say she had never had any, unless there was some one at hand to deny her statement."
When Clifford came home that evening, Knutty herself broached the subject again.
"Kjaere," she said, "did I have a few admirers in my time, or did I not? I have forgotten. Not that a woman ever does forget, but tell me!"
"You had numbers, Knutty," Clifford answered, smiling at her; "and I was jealous of them all. At nine I was jealous of the sea-captain, and at ten I was jealous of the clergyman in Jutland, and at twelve of the English architect, and at thirteen of the Swedish officer, and so on and so on."
Later in the evening, when he and Katharine were sitting alone near the great hay-barn, Katharine spoke of Knutty.
"She is the dearest old woman I have ever met," she said warmly. "I don't wonder that you all love her."
"I can never tell you what she has been to me," he answered. "It was always a great grief to me that——" He broke off.
"It was a great grief to me that——"
Again he broke off. He was trying to speak of Knutty's indifference to Marianne; and even this was too hard for him to say. Up in the mountains, he had felt that it would be easy for him to tell Katharine everything that he had in his heart, beginning with the story of Marianne and Marianne's death, and ending with himself and his love for her. But now that he was near her, he could say nothing about his own personal life and inner feelings. He could only bend forward and scratch a hole in the ground with his stick. Katharine remembered how Knutty had spoken of his "beginnings" and "breakings off," and she said:
"Knutty understands you through and through, Professor Thornton. Doesn't she?"
"Yes," he answered simply. "But why should you say that just now?"
"Oh, I don't know," Katharine answered. "I was thinking of her, and it came into my head. And I was so touched by her grief when she feared that she—we—had lost you."
"I do not know what she and the boy would have done without you," he said, still working with that stick.
Katharine was silent.
"And I cannot think what those men over at the Skyds-station would have done without you," he said. "Their last words to me this afternoon were, 'Tell her we shall always be wishing to serve her.'"
Katharine remained silent.
"There was this little packet which I was to give you," he said, after a pause. "It was the poor fellow's South African service-medal. You were to have it."
He watched her as she opened the packet and touched the medal. He watched her as she put it in the palm of her hand and looked at it with dim eyes. It would have been easy for him to have opened his heart to her then and there, if he could only have known that she was saying to him with speechless tongue:
"My own dear love, whilst I am looking at this soldier's medal, my heart is giving thanks that the lightning spared you to me."
But he could not guess that, and the moment passed.
The next day, when they were again alone, he attempted to speak.
"Do you remember my saying up at the Saeter that I tried never to dream?" he began.
"Yes," she said. "I have always wished to ask you why you should feel so strongly about dreams."
"I should like to tell you," he said eagerly. "I want to tell you. But——"
He broke off again, and turned to her with a pathetic smile on his face.
"Speech has never been easy to me," he said.
CHAPTER XVIII.
BEDSTEFAR'S FUNERAL.
The day before Bedstefar's funeral Jens and Alan came down from the mountain-lake laden with nearly two hundred pounds of trout, and the cotters' children finished their task of bringing in all the multebaer they could find; for no Norwegian entertainment, taking place at this season of the year, would have been considered complete without this much-loved fruit; and certainly it would seem that multebaer had a softening effect on the strange and somewhat hard Norwegian temperament. As Tante said, from her own personal observations of the previous days, multebaer spelt magic!
"Ibsen has not done justice to his country," she told Gerda. "He ought at least once to have described them as being under the influence of these berries. Then a softer side of their nature would have been made apparent to all. Why, the Sorenskriver himself becomes a woolly lamb as he bends over his plate of cloudberries-and-cream. He ought to have his photograph taken. No one would recognise him, and that is what photographs are for!"
They all helped to decorate the Gaard inside and out with branches of firs and birches. Bedstefar's black house was decorated too, and the whole courtyard was covered with sprigs of juniper and fir. A beautiful arch of fir and birch was raised over the white gate through which he would pass for the last time on his way down to the old church in the valley.
Katharine, together with Ragnhild and Ingeborg, spent many hours making strips of wreathing from twigs of the various berry-shrubs up in the woods. Karl used these for lettering; so that stretched from side to side of the arch ran the words, "Farvel, kjaere Bedstefar."
When he had finished, every one came out to see his work, and Mor Inga, turning to Tante, said proudly:
"My Karl is clever, isn't he?"
And she whispered:
"Three years ago he did that for our eldest son, and bitterly we were weeping then. I go about thinking of that now."
Then Tante and Mor Inga took a little stroll away from the others, outside the gate and down the road towards the great cowhouse. Part of this road, too, had been planted with tall fir-branches, so that Bedstefar would pass under the archway and through an avenue of green until he reached the outer white gate, which was the entrance to the Gaard enclosure. And here Mor Inga and Tante lingered, whilst the proud Norwegian heart gave vent to its sadness, and the kindly Danish heart beat in understanding sympathy, and the dead son's dog Jeppe came and whined softly in token that he too was mourning in remembrance of the past.
So the night, the bright Norwegian night, beginning to realise that its brightness was being threatened, seeing that the birches were counting their yellow leaves, even as we, no longer young and not yet old, count our grey hairs, this summer night passed almost imperceptibly into morning, and the activities of the next day began early.
Bedstemor, reinstated in her former rôle of leading lady of the Gaard, was in a state of feverish excitement. She was dressed in black, and wore over her bodice a fine black silk shawl one hundred years old. Her head was encased in a sort of black silk night-cap, edged with old white lace: so that her pretty face was framed in white. A slight flush on her cheeks made her look strangely youthful. She sat in the porch waiting to receive the guests; and by special request of Mor Inga and Solli himself, Tante, Gerda, and Katharine sat there too. They felt awkward at first, knowing themselves to be there in the capacity of sightseers rather than that of mourners; but Bedstemor's cheerful spirits put them at their ease. She was much interested in Katharine's dress-material, feeling the texture and comparing it with her own.
"It is very good," she said thoughtfully, "but not so good as mine!"
All the same, that dress-material worried her; she fingered it several times, nodded mysteriously, and seemed lost in thought; whether about Bedstefar or the dress-material, no one could of course decide. But, later, she spoke of some wreaths which had been sent, and she said quaintly:
"Min mand did not want any flowers. But it does not matter much what he wanted. He won't know, stakkar, will he?"
At last the guests began to arrive, some in carioles, some in stol-kjaerres, and some few in ordinary carriages. They all brought funeral-cakes in large painted baskets. As each conveyance drove up into the courtyard, one of the daughters, either Ragnhild, or Ingeborg, or Helga, went out to meet it, greeted the guests, and bore away the cake into the kitchen. It seemed to be the etiquette that the cake should be received in person by one of the family. The horses, most of them the knowing little Norwegian yellow Nordfjord pony, or else the somewhat bigger Gudbrandsdal black horse, were unharnessed and led away by the cotters. The guests advanced awkwardly to the porch, greeted Bedstemor, and turned to the strangers shyly, but were at once reassured by Tante's genial bearing and Katharine's friendly smile. Gerda, too, was at her best, and was feeling so cheerful that Tante feared she was going to break into song. Quaint, strange-looking people crossed that threshold, shook hands with every one in the porch, and passed into the house to find Bedstemor, who had disappeared into the hall, and was seated in a corner drinking port wine with an old friend. Wine and coffee were served at once, as a sign of welcome to the Gaard. The flag, which had been lowered to half-mast since Bedstefar's death, was now hoisted full-mast to welcome the guests to the proud Solli homestead. The women, some of them beautiful in feature, were ungraceful in form and bearing; they dressed no longer in the picturesque Gudbrandsdal costume, but were all clothed in ill-fitting black dresses, with no remnant of the picturesque anywhere: queenly-looking women, some of them born, one would think, to be mothers of Vikings; and most of them with proud pedigrees which would excite envy in many a royal breast: shy and awkward, most of them, even with each other. The men had perhaps a little more savoir faire, but it was easy to see that they all led lonely lives, and were part and parcel of that lonely land on which Nature has set a seal of mystic melancholy. Some of the men were fine fellows, but none as handsome as Solli, Karl, and Jens; but the Solli tribe had long been celebrated for their good looks, and old Bedstefar in his time had been voted the best-looking man in the whole of the Gudbrandsdal. The guests were nearly all Bönder (landowners), representing the best blood in the valley; most of them having the largest Gaards, and the best-decorated pews in the churches of the different districts. Then there was the Lensmand (bailiff), a weird old man, rather feeble of gait, but acute in wit. He seemed much taken with Katharine, and came several times to shake hands with her, pretending to be a newcomer each time. But he had to keep more in the background when his superior officer, the Foged (under-magistrate), appeared on the scene. This gentleman was, of course, a local personage, and he brought a very large wreath and wore an important black satin waistcoat. There was also the doctor, Distriktslaege[R] Larsen, famous for his rough ways and disagreeable temper, but also for his skill in mending broken arms and legs during the "ski" season. He seemed rather scornful of the whole scene, but not of the port wine. And there was a Tandlaege[S] (dentist), from Christiania, a nephew of the Sollis, who wore a very long black frock-coat and the most fashionable pointed boots. He was their representative man of the world and fashion, and they prized him greatly. There were yet two other precious persons—a member of the Storthing,[T] Bedstemor's nephew, and his wife, rather a fine lady, who at first kept herself in 'splendid isolation,' but soon forgot that she was a Storthingsmand's wife with a Parisian dress, and threw her lot in with her un-Parisian-clothed relations. She was a little suspicious of the Englishwoman, perceiving indeed a formidable rival in well-cut garments; but directly Katharine and she began to speak to each other in an ingenious mixture of German and broken English, suspicions gave way to approbation, and she said to her husband: